Tanat Teeradakorn: “How can I make people question what they see? We need to be sceptical”

Visiting Tanat Teeradakorn’s exhibition ‘National Opera Complex’ at Gasworks in London is a bit of an overwhelming experience, so I’m grateful to have the Bangkok-based artist with me for the ride. Nothing seems to dull his enthusiasm, whether it be the hangover from last night’s opening or the slight language barrier. We’re immediately met by colourful movie stills depicting dancers in various poses and anime outfits, with Tanat’s own high-energy electronic music blaring around the space. Next comes a floor-to-celling technicolour opera backdrop, complete with lightning strikes and golden birds. Tanat tells me that this space was full to the brim last night, with visitors falling over themselves attempting to copy the dancers’ poses.

We spend most of our time at Tanat’s souvenir stand. Modelled on the Oxford Street-type which sells Union Jack mugs and football scarves, Tanat has designed every piece of merchandise, from caps to whistles. There are shirts emblazoned with messages like ‘if we can’t dance it’s not our revolution’, transforming a space normally reserved for tourist tat into a site for political resistance. Inside the stand and through some black-out curtains is a viewing room for Tanat’s 17-minute film The Rise and Fall of Absolutism.

As we watch the film, Tanat teaches me how to copy the dancers on the screen who are merging the traditional Thai dance Ramvong with the kind you’re more likely to find on TikTok. Safe to say, he’s much better at this than I am. Split into acts, the film takes the viewer on a journey from palace to factory. It’s set to Tanat’s chaotic yet addictive remixes of historical protest songs, a tool of resistance that he believes “creates collective solidarity.” “When people share music together at a protest, they are sharing emotion,” he adds. Featuring messages like ‘the disintegration of paradise’ that flash on the screen, the film tells the story of multiple revolutions throughout Thailand’s turbulent history.

Leaving the space to find a quieter spot to chat, I’m struggling to know where to start with so much to unpack. I begin with Tanat’s journey into the art world. “I wasn’t really in it,” he says simply. “Growing up in Bangkok, I was in punk bands with friends, and we would go sifting through old vinyls in record shops. I really liked the design on them, and it prompted me to study graphic design.”

For Tanat, music has always gone hand in hand with visual art (he’s actually DJing an earlier version of the music you can hear in the exhibitions at Spanner the Friday after we chat). Spending his youth in Thailand seeking out alternative spaces for experimental music, it was a love of the art form which propelled Tanat into his first show; his moment of inspiration was a happy sonic accident. While working as a graphic designer, Tanat lived opposite a motorcycle garage that doubled as a hotbed for young people to gather, tinker with engines and play music. In my head, it’s giving Fast and Furious. “I was working from home and the sound from outside was clashing with my own music,” Tanat explains. “At first I didn’t like it and actually went outside to ask them to turn it down, it was shaking the whole house!” Unsurprisingly, those at the garage didn’t listen to Tanat. But after a while, this music, which is called Saiyor (meaning ‘bend your knee’ – a reference to the accompanying dance moves) began to grow on him. “The experience aroused a new awareness,” he explains. “I noticed that from around 6 pm, their truck parties would turn the quiet, isolated area into an open-air dance floor. It made me think about why people so often feel the need to oppose the context of their surroundings.”

Tanat began to immerse himself in the culture, going to car audio modification events where the vehicles themselves were turned into amps. This led to his 2017 show in Bangkok titled ‘Dance Non-Stop Mix’, which involved a site-specific amp built in the corner of a dark dance floor. Making me nostalgic for a bygone era, Tanat scrolls through photos of the exhibition on his archived Tumblr account. “We wanted to make the space vibrate a lot, so the sound can leak onto the outside,” says Tanat, who hoped, to replicate the open-air dance parties which had so intrigued him about the scene in the first place. “I wanted people to hear the music on the inside and feel the vibrations on the outside,” he says. “It was so loud the police came,” he laughs.

Tanat didn’t become involved in politics, the overarching theme of his London show, until COVID-19. “I saw a lot of economic inequality and people clashing with the police during this time. I became curious about why the system was like this,” he explains. So, with the same due diligence that Tanat investigated a subculture, he turned his attention to Thailand’s monarchy and drew inspiration from the book The Rise and Decline of Thai Absolutism, from which his film takes its name. Tanat realised that a lot of the information about Thailand’s various revolutions, including the 1973 popular uprising, had been missing from his school texts. This also led him to reevaluate the media’s portrayal of the 2010 military crackdown, in which many protestors were killed in their fight for democratic elections. This is the crux of his current work, through forming new narratives around Thailand’s history of consecutive uprisings and repressions, he aims to encourage more shrewd readings of these events “I want to portray the multiple ways we consume information nowadays”, he tells me. “How can I make people question what they see? We need to be sceptical.”

Tanat also started exploring the shared experiences of Thailand and the UK. He teaches me about the Bowring Treaty of 1855, establishing the first trade agreement between what was then Siam and a Western Nation. He states that it was in part this agreement which put Thailand on the road to capitalism. This, combined with the shared monarchical systems of the two nations, is the reason he decided to model his tourist stand on one you’d see in the UK. “I’m interested in how daily consumer products, especially souvenirs, become containers for stories, spread across people and locations. In my interpretation, it’s a form that can reflect collective memory,” he says.

This playful approach to storytelling allows the Tanat to jump between timelines, looking at the distribution and circulation of histories and objects and the ever narrowing gap between fact and fiction. Towards the end of the tour, I try to tie all these themes together and become as overwhelmed as I was when I entered the space. Tanat however, remains unphased until the moment we parted ways. “Reality is made out of fiction, so I made the fiction to reflect reality. That’s it,” he says simply, “that’s the idea.”